Final English 211G Blog Entry

English 211G or Writing in the Humanities & Social Sciences - Cyberwriting: Blogging, Social Media, & Future Texts is a course I took as one of the options to fulfill a core requirement in the Library Science Associate of Applied Science Degree. The Writing in the Humanities & Social Sciences courses have different focus options. The Cyberwriting: Blogging, Social Media, & Future Texts focus seemed the most relevant to my career goal of becoming a librarian.

The semester culminated in a final assignment to create a module for a future class. The group I was in for this assignment consisted of Autumn, Carolanne, and myself. Our decision process wasn’t particularly extensive or elaborate. Carolanne suggested Pinterest and we went with it. I can’t speak to the reasons that my group mates were interested in creating a module covering Pinterest. I was interested in doing it because I’ve never had an account on Pinterest.

For me, half the fun was that I was going into this project knowing the bare minimum about Pinterest. For instance I knew that it was picture heavy and somehow like using a bulletin board, but on the Web.

Having Fall Break right at the beginning of this module got us off to a slow start. Although we decided on Pinterest on November 16th, we didn’t divvy up the tasks until November 30th. We worked with the same group from previous group assignments and used Hangouts to communicate. Unfortunately we did lose one of our group members. Honestly we did not do as good a job of communicating for this project as in previous projects. Although I tried to keep us moving forward in communication, I think the group member we lost was much better at that particular task.

To complete this module, we needed to produce four items - an assignment, a discussion, a quiz, and blog entry instructions. Carolanne completed our assignment, Autumn completed our discussion, and I took on the quiz and blog entry instructions.

Over Fall Break, I did some searching on the World Wide Web to find resources for our module. I put what I found in a Google Doc and shared it with the group, inviting them to add more. In the end, I placed seven of the links I found, three to informational articles and four to ‘how to’ resources, into our module.

One interesting thing I learned when looking for resources for our module was that Pinterest had a massive overhaul earlier this year and many of the resources available showed the old interface. Luckily the interface changes were not extreme. I kept searching for videos until I found one that used the new interface for the ‘how to’ section. I didn’t want people to be confused by an old interface in a video.

vs.

I believe that Autumn, Carolanne and I all considered our audience for this project to be people in a community college English class. This meant putting together something for a group with some people interested in Pinterest as a social media platform, but also some who might not be particularly interested. Throughout the semester I noticed that most of the modules had some students who displayed little interest in the particular social media platform being covered. However, one of the purposes of taking a class is to stretch one’s boundaries.

From the technical end, creating the framework to attach our assignment, discussion, quiz, and blog entry assignment was fairly easy. I’m comfortable and happy playing with computer interfaces. The video provided by the instructor was enough to get me going setting things up in Canvas. I did read through the other Canvas tutorial links provided for fun, but they weren’t necessary. Although I volunteered to do the framework for our module, I made sure to leave it up to Autumn & Carolanne to post their own sections in our Canvas module so that they would not miss out on the experience of creating something in Canvas.

For my portions, aside from finding the resources and the administrative task of creating the framework, I made a quiz and a blog entry.

For the the first part of the quiz, I used some short answer questions that would require students to have done the readings and also do a bit of critical thinking. The second part of the quiz was a practical exercise that would allow students to demonstrate that they had some basic knowledge of using Pinterest.

Sample Short Answer Quiz Question

Sample Practical Quiz Question

For the blog post, I considered how throughout the course our instructor had given us academic blog post assignments that related to the module at hand, but went beyond just the particular social media platform to larger issues. Pinterest is a social media platform where people classify objects and share that classification. The blog entry assignment I chose was write a critical response to A Brief Introduction to Folksonomy, which is the kind of classification that people are doing on Pinterest, whether they know it or not.

Despite the slow start, and our somewhat shaky communications, our group got the module completed and turned in before the deadline.

This is my last English 211G Blog entry. Now I have to decide what to focus on for this blog in the future. Any thoughts?

Gotta Catch Some Mandatory Fun

Growing up as an Army Brat, I experienced many situations in which we were required to participate in mandatory fun. When I read the assignment for this blog post, it brought those days to mind. As an Army Brat, mandatory fun usually consisted of attending Organization Day, which was a giant picnic/barbecue with lots of silly games and competitions. As an NCO, Dad was effectively required to bring his family along to participate in the fun. If our commanding officer, er, I mean instructor has ordered me to have fun over break than I am up for the task.

I generally work during Fall Break, which leaves no good window for travel and little time for shenanigans. Mostly Fall Break is about catching up on sleep. However, driven by the need to write about something fun, I decided to torment my husband over break to give me something more than sleeping in to write about.

My preferred means of tormenting him is to drag him on photo walks out in some sort of natural surroundings. We’re both shutterbugs. Unfortunately, I’m working through a plantar fasciitis flare up at the moment and that means long (or even medium length) hikes are pretty much out. Getting too far away from places where I can make sad eyes at my husband and ask him to go get the car if necessary is not the best idea in the middle of a flare up. From past experience I know I will get through it faster if I can get in lots of short bursts of walking with rest in between. Just walking bores me, especially when I’m stuck either walking slow or being in enough pain to end the walk too soon. I find it really hard to be motivated to walk when I know it will make my foot hurt.

Enter the “Pokéwalk”. Pokémon Go is a phone/tablet game that came out last summer. It was incredibly popular for a little while. The popularity seems to have died off fairly quickly, but my husband and I got into the game late.  The Pokémon slogan is “Gotta catch ‘em all!” and we haven’t even come close yet.

Pokémon Go makes for a nice distraction while walking and also gives us a reason besides my cranky foot to keep it slow and pause often. We have to pause to collect resources from Poké Stops and to catch Pokémon along the way. I also get to torment my husband by dragging him along and making him play too, which makes it win/win. Okay, okay, he does enjoy the game somewhat and definitely enjoys humoring me so it’s not really tormenting him to make him go on a Pokéwalk.

Over the week of Fall Break, in order to acquire sufficient mandatory fun for blogging purposes, my husband and I went on several Pokéwalks. It may sound low key or possibly even boring, but we enjoy it. The leaves are turning lovely colors. It’s cooler, but not cold yet - perfect walking weather.

Academic Blog - Critical Response to TED Talk “The Tribes We Lead” by Seth Godin

I get the feeling that this is supposed to be a highly inspirational TED Talk, but for me, it falls flat. However, I could just be in a bad mood as I’m writing this. Part of the problem is that the organization is lacking. Godin goes from point to point without much connection between many of them. Another part of the problem is that Godin seems to think that people in general try to change things. My experience, or perhaps my cynicism, tells me the opposite. People are generally more inclined to fight change than embrace it. People who seek and work for change are rare.

In the SPCA example that he uses to support his apparent argument that people seek change, the details of the story more strongly support the counter argument that people fight change. Godin tells us how Nathan Winograd and his boss at the SPCA had to fight to get a change in how stray animals were handled in San Francisco. People from other SPCAs and humane shelters were willing to fly to San Francisco to fight against this change. People in general resist change. Change happens when a person or small group are willing to go all out fighting for it.

The San Francisco SPCA was only able to focus on making San Francisco a no-kill city after giving up their existing animal control responsibilities. If you look at this timeline at Best Friends, you’ll see that it took Rich Avanzino (Winograd’s boss) 10 years and surrendering animal control responsibility the Department of Animal Care and Control that had to be formed due to Avanzino ending the SPCA’s contract with the city (with 5 years notice), to make San Francisco a no-kill city. It actually took five years beyond when San Francisco SPCA handed animal control over to the Department of Animal Care and Control for them to establish an adoption pact with the city run service to make San Francisco a no-kill city.

Their efforts and dedication are admirable, but I think they make an excellent example of how fiercely people resist change. This is clearly not the point he’s trying to make.

Watching again for the third or fourth time, I think that he might have made a stronger argument if he somehow made it clear that he told the SPCA story at the beginning to demonstrate how much harder it was to connect with people and encourage them to embrace change prior to the explosion of social media. Then again, he didn’t mention how long it took for Winograd and Avanzino to bring about the change they fought for. Godin probably intended that first example as support for his arguments about connection and tribes.

I do agree with the argument that tribes and the human drive to connect are the way to change the world, although I didn’t feel that Godin supported it very strongly with his talk. Godin seems to alternate between providing examples of connection and providing examples of leaders. He doesn’t link the examples together very well in the structure of his talk, and this makes his call to action at the end weaker than it could have been.

Musing on Hashtag Popularity

The current module in #engl211 has us delving into the murky world of social media marketing.

What makes one hashtag trend and another fade into oblivion?

Nobody really knows. There are lots of people out there writing essays on the subject. People who want to sell you on  their social media marketing expertise will make lists of ways to get more eyeballs on your content and write them up in neat little bite sized articles. But they don’t really know. They’re making educated guesses. Sometimes their advice works, sometimes it drives people away.  

Our assignment right now is to go on Twitter and promote a hashtag of our own design. The group I’m in decided to go with #BorderlandPics. It is a brand new hashtag so we can shape it any way we want without interference from or piggybacking on preexisting tweets. On my Twitter account I introduced it with this new pinned tweet:

Our idea was inspired by another hashtag - #WolWednesday. This is a hashtag that was started by author Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) back in March 2015. This hashtag, which is all about sharing pictures of owls, is still going. Apparently lots of people like owls. Er, I’m sorry, I mean wols.

You might wonder how sharing owl pictures could possibly be marketing. My Twitter experience is largely in the publishing world. I follow authors, publishers, and the like. From what I’ve observed, if an author goes on Twitter and just tweets about his or her books, that drives potential readers away. I know I unfollow an author after two many straight up promotional tweets and I am not alone in that. Therefore, authors on Twitter generally only do straightforward promotion during specific times. If an author normally tweets like a human being making connections, tweeting excitedly about a book release is quite acceptable. Whether he did it deliberately or is just Sam Sykes being Sam Sykes, the #WolWednesday promotes Sam Sykes author brand by drawing people to his Twitter account in a fun way. This is an indirect form of marketing.

We don’t actually have a product to promote, so the indirect marketing of a picture sharing hashtag seemed like a fun way to go. If anything, we are promoting where we live.

So far, my group has shared a few pictures and we’ve gotten one post to our hashtag from someone not in our group. We’ve only be going for a few days now, so I won’t speculate on reasons why we’re not getting more eyeballs. Of the tweets I’ve shared, this has been my most popular:

I know exactly why it has gotten all that attention. One of the re-tweets was @poisonedpen and that put it in front of a lot of people. Poisoned Pen Bookstore has almost seven thousand followers on Twitter. Given time we can get more tweets in front of more people. Eventually some might join in.

One final thought - after Tuesday’s election, I’m starting to wish I had suggested my other idea for a hashtag - #WarmFuzzyTwitter. The idea behind that one would have been to spread kind and supportive words throughout Twitter and encourage others to do the same. A hashtag like that could be helpful to a lot of people any time, but right now especially. Small joys keep us going in dark times. I thought it was too silly to share, but now it doesn't feel quite so silly.

The Assignment I Didn't Want to Do

I started the Twitter assignment like any reasonable adult would. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. There may even have been some pouting. Poor @tonydero had to listen to a ton of whining about this horrible, awful, evil assignment.

I decided to make a new account so I wouldn't break my real Twitter. All the way through set up to the point of adding a cover photo, and Twitter decides I’m a #robot. Locked me out and insisted that I provide a phone number to get back in. Twitter does not need my frakking phone number. Grrrr... Cue more wailing and gnashing of teeth. I melted down. October has not been an awesome month and my resilience for minor setbacks was down to nil. But the meltdown ended, as meltdowns do, and I decided to just do this thing on my real Twitter. #pout.

Process

First step - send @KurtDepnerENGL a screenshot showing my starting follower count.

Cropped version of what I sent @KurtDepnerENGL

Second step - pin a tweet so that anyone who’s already following me will know what the heck is going on.

Mildly cranky Pinned Tweet

Third step - mentally review the materials provided and decide how to go about this craziness. There are lots of legitimate and ethical ways to get followers.

Since I used my real Twitter account I only wanted to do things that fit well with who I am. I made three basic changes to my Twitter behavior.

1. Tweet or Retweet a few times every single day.
2. Use #hashtags more often.
3. Follow back new followers ASAP.

The first and second changes were no big deal. Although I tend to be more of a #lurker than a tweeter most days, participating actively is a simple change. Using #hashtags is not something I ever thought about much, but again - an easy change. Neither of these behaviors go against who I am at all. The third behavior is a bit more of a stretch, as I prefer to limit how many people I follow. However, this was a matter of doing something outside my comfort zone rather than going against my character. Stepping outside your comfort zone is good.

I kept my strategy simple with the thought that I’d most likely have to try different changes after the first couple of days. It turned out that these three steps produced a steadily increasing follower count over the course of the assignment.

Tweeting or Retweeting Daily

This part was easy. Tweeting or retweeting on a daily basis was as simple as changing my passive #lurking on Twitter into a more active endeavor. As a side effect, I think it may have actually reduced the total time I spent on Twitter. Tweeting or retweeting a few things gave me a sense of closure that made it easier to move on to other tasks. When I’m just reading Twitter it is far too easy to scroll down just a bit more, then a bit more, then a bit more. #JustOneMoreTurn

#hashtags

Although I had rarely thought about them in the past, this assignment taught me that #hashtags are awesome. They help you connect with your tribe. Use #hashtags so that people who share your interests see your tweets. I’ll likely continue to use #hashtags more often in the future.

Some #hashtags I used:

Jaxon photobombed, but he's part Catahoula so it's OK 

#engl211

#bookworm & #bookwyrm)
#BannedBooksWeek

#bannedbooks
#librarylife

#saturdaylibrarian

#libraryclerk 
#wolwednesday
#homework
#amwriting
#NationalCatDay
#haiku

There were times that I could have come up with #hashtags and failed to do so. It is not an automatic habit for me. Here’s one example:

What #hashtags would you have used?

Following Back

In my experience on Twitter, there are tons of people that are only interested in following you if you follow them back. I didn’t want to deal with the usual dance of people following then unfollowing me because I didn’t follow back quickly enough during this module. I made a point of following any account that didn’t raise red flags for me within 24 hours.

I did follow some accounts that I typically wouldn’t have. I’m now following more accounts than I want to be following. Over the next several days, I will likely unfollow several accounts that are too #promotiony for my taste. This means my follower count will certainly drop some. I’m totally happy with that. Among those accounts that I typically wouldn’t have followed are some that seem to be awesome. So I’ve been missing out with my practice of waiting to follow back. I will likely be more diligent about deciding whether or not I want to follow people back in the future.

Top Tweets

3 of my top 5 tweets @-ed someone. Twitter is all about connecting.

Final Thoughts

Part of the assignment is to share our follower count at the end. Here's mine:

I was beyond reluctant about this assignment in the beginning and had so much fun with it by the end. Using #hashtags helped me connect with the kind of people that I’m on Twitter to connect with. Although I’m not big on collecting followers, I found it valuable to step outside my comfort zone and learned that I can connect with more people on Twitter and still be me.

All in all, this assignment that I didn’t want to do is now my favorite of the semester.

The Dark Side of Social Media

Today we have a critical response to When Online Shaming Spirals out of Control TED Talk , an academic blog post for #engl211.

In this TED Talk, Jon Ronson claims that Twitter was originally “a place of radical de-shaming” where the voiceless found a powerful voice. He argues that this was good, but it evolved into something terrible. A few tweets that picked up momentum could make a giant corporation realize that people are watching and they aren’t going to get away with being heartless or evil. From giving the voiceless a voice, Twitter evolved into a place where people didn’t just keep corporations from being evil, but also went after people who are perceived to have had and abused privilege.

Ronson supports his assertion with two examples. The first was pop science writer Jonah Lehrer. After being caught faking quotes, self-plagiarizing (re-using prior material without noting it was from prior work), and plagiarizing the work of others. Mr. Lehrer had a speaking engagement that would give him the opportunity to apologize for his intellectual misconduct. The foundation that he spoke before set up two screens with Twitter feeds, one that the audience could see and another that he could see while he was making his speech.

The people watching the live streamed event made comments to and about Mr. Lehrer on Twitter while he was speaking. Seeing a privileged white man make a speech about his poor decision making brought out some of the ugliness of the online world.  

With the help of a stapler and a conveniently placed down arrow key, I scrolled down in the #infoneeds feed to the day of the speech. The comments that are there now are mostly not that bad. I understand that people can delete tweets and a bunch of negative comments may have been deleted. However, the overall tone of it now is a bit of negativity with a lot of reasonable tweets and the occasional reminder to be civil.

I have to admit that although it is ugly to have a man apologizing for getting caught in a pattern of journalistic misconduct while surrounded by a Twitter feed that contains a number of negative comments, I find it hard to sympathize with him. His intellectual dishonesty benefited him and he was apologizing because he was caught. If he had to be uncomfortable while apologizing, I’m sure the $20K honorarium that he received for his speech was a comfort. I find it interesting that a Knight Foundation post the day after Mr. Lehrer’s speech says that they regret paying him a speaking fee.

While the story of Jonah Lehrer is indeed an example of online shaming, I think Ronson could have found many better examples to support his argument. That may be why he spent more time on the second example which is much stronger.

Justine Sacco, a PR professional with a small following on Twitter, made a stupid ugly tweet while traveling. One of her followers sent that tweet to a journalist with many followers and a massive Twitter storm ensued. Being a woman on the Internet is far more dangerous than being a man, and the kinds of responses she got for a moment of indiscretion were terrible. As Ronson says:

Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired." When a woman gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus."

I was on Twitter when the Justine Sacco Twitter storm hit. I remember seeing this woman’s name pop up in my feed and thinking that her tweet was terrible. I wondered if she was really that racist and ignorant or if it was somehow supposed to be a joke that just didn’t make sense to me. I remember being shocked that a PR professional could come up with such a tweet.

Having watched the Justine Sacco Twitter storm play out in real time, I can only agree with what Ronson says about mob behavior on Twitter. It starts out small with disbelief and shock that quickly turns to anger and personal threats. The more people talk about something like this, the more likely it is that someone will say something negative. Negative tweets bounce around the echo chamber and can lead to horrible threats.

This was a valuable talk on a difficult reality of social media. Ronson makes solid points and supports them well with real life examples. In the after talk he notes that it is important to stand up for people who are being shamed so that there’s a “babble of voices” instead of straight negativity. He suggests this, knowing that standing up for the target of a Twitter mob makes you a target too. He suggests this as a way to keep the Internet from turning into a place where fear silences us.

The Internet is an ugly place. If you make a mistake that goes viral, it can literally ruin your life. Both of the people Ronson used as examples were eventually able to start over, but the recovery process is long and difficult. Ronson ends his talk with a call to action. Don’t let the Internet turn into a place where we give up our voices to survive.

News and Social Media

And here we have another academic blog post for English 211G. The mission - write a critical response to The Facebook Effect on the News.

In this Atlantic Monthly article from February 2014, Derek Thompson argues that in 2013 claiming that Facebook and Twitter were the Internet’s new homepages might have been a nearly original observation, but in 2014, such a statement had become fact.

Thompson supports this argument by noting that traffic from homepages had dropped across many websites while traffic from social media dramatically increased. He includes a supporting graph showing that in December 2011, Google and Facebook sent near equal numbers of clicks to the Buzzfeed network. By December 2013, Facebook’s share of the traffic was more than three times that of Google's.

Do we want news or cat pictures?

From that foundation, he goes on to consider the question of what kinds of stories do people click on from Facebook. He notes that The Atlantic’s most successful Facebook stories ‘aren’t news-pegged’ but are “what journalists call ‘evergreen’ stories”. Evergreen stories aren’t about recent events. They are about subjects of ongoing interest such as happiness, dieting, and decision making. He notes that these are stories of the sort that Upworthy specializes in and that Upworthy was definitely enjoying an abundance of clicks from Facebook pages.

Thompson points out that Facebook’s News Feed isn’t really a news feed at all. As Thompson says it can be better described as an entertainment portal. He cites a 2013 Pew study that fewer that half of Facebook users ever even read news on Facebook and only 10 percent log into Facebook specifically to see news.

To support this observation Thompson supplies Top 20 lists of Twitter’s top stories in 2013, the Top 20 most searched stories for 2013, and Buzzfeed’s Top 20 most viral stories. The Buzzfeed stories being the ones most clicked on from Facebook. Based on those lists, Twitter seems to be a blend of news and evergreen stories, heavily skewed towards entertainment news. The most searched stories are much more strongly focused on news stories. The Facebook (Buzzfeed viral) stories are largely entertainment and evergreen stories.

Cats can be awfully cute.

He goes on to claim that the primary difference between Facebook and older forms of entertainment is that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation”. This is the first statement in the article that I have to disagree with. I can’t actually recall how the News Feed was in 2014, but it currently is only somewhat based on your activity. Yes, we do choose our friends and how we interact with our friends’ posts, but that only gives us the illusion of creating our own News Feed.

I can think of at least one reported instances of Facebook manipulating News Feeds:

Facebook Tinkers With User’s Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry

Even when not manipulating the New Feed actively, the Facebook algorithm exercises a great deal of control over what we are shown. Follow someone and interact with every single post that appears in your News Feed and Facebook still won’t show you all of their posts. Follow a page and it is even worse. Facebook wants page owners to pay for advertising and limits how many of their followers see each post organically.

Me? I prefer dog pictures.

While we can certainly influence what we see on Facebook, we do not create our own News Feeds. Although I disagree that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation” I do agree that it does indicate users’ preferences.

All in all, Thompson’s article was worth reading and very appropriate to this class. He highlights one of the major differences between social media (Facebook and Twitter) and other means of getting information from the Web. I found it interesting that Twitter usage skewed more towards news seeking than Facebook usage. I would have thought that the shorter format of Twitter would not encourage that. It shouldn’t have surprised me though. Even though I follow mostly authors and publishing related people on Twitter, I still see a ton of news come through my feed.

What do you think? Do you know anyone who’s Facebook (or Twitter) feed is all news all the time?